The curse of Kurt Cobain

To achieve a lifetime goal, Amanda must keep an embarrassing secret...

The test was scheduled for two fifty-four at the training centre. Amanda barely noticed traffic or road signs as she drove up the freeway and Joondalup drive, focussed, ready.
Bench pressing fifty kilos would be a doddle. She’d lifted more at CrossFit, but her distant memory of the Police Academy gym was a cavern of stained gyp rock panelling, scruffy carpet squares, a pervading stench of unwashed teenager and free weights re-used from ballast on the ark. They’d moved, of course, but would the penny pinchers in charge have upgraded the gear?
The run test frightened her more. Amanda’s stumpy legs hadn’t done stamina when she was a star-struck teenager dreaming of front-page arrests, shootouts with notorious villains and commissioned rank. With promotion her only remaining fantasy, she had an extra thirty pounds to drag around and the leggings. They cramped her stride on the aborted practice at Scarborough Beach, but she could not run in shorts.
If the instructor saw her legs…
The parrot on the thigh could be forgiven - Amanda had been drunk and befuddled in the depths of a Bali holiday fling. ‘Let’s get tats,’ he said, and she was all in. As you were when images of babies and living large on his FIFO salary made you forget you were a serving officer.
The SAS dagger on the other thigh—and thank God she resisted that beau’s urging to have their names added—was about balance, but the others, with twenty years hindsight, were insane. A bitter reaction to promotion boards choosing fit, tall blokes time and again over the vertically challenged South Asian? At sergeants and inspectors who took the credit when her painstaking research produced a lead that nailed the conviction? Anyway, the sailing ship on the left calf and Kurt Cobain on the right, which stung like razor cuts going on and looked more like Darryl Braithwaite, had faded into unrecognisable blue-black swirls. One sight of that lot and she’d be off the force, never mind passed over for the Library Sergeant-in-Charge position that was hers by right. It had been promised after her blemish-free acting stint when Fred Tarkovsky took his pension, and she nailed the interview, subject only to the compulsory fitness test for all candidates seeking leadership roles.
In half an hour, Amanda would know. Less if she blew it or exposed her calves. The tension would be epic, but she survived Supreme Court cross-examination by brutal KCs in the Palmer case, did she not?
Amanda parked between two patrol cars, straightened her uniform, checked her cap in the rearview mirror and grabbed her gym bag from the boot.
Her heart skittered when the nice young lass on reception showed her the way to the change rooms, a single door that opened onto a corridor with Ladies on the left and Gents on the right framing a glow of golden pine under skylights pockmarked with weight machine stations. Phew! The opposite of the dingy sweatshop at Maylands. Anxiety swamped her relief. She was so close!
Focus, Amanda!
She stuck with her plan to change out of the blue serge uniform pants in a toilet cubicle although a towel on one hook and a single forgotten Croc under a bench were all that shared the room. If someone barged in before she shrouded her extraordinary pins in psychedelic lime leggings, everyone in WA Police would know by shift change. Amanda pulled the lycra down over her ankles, tucked in her City to Surf fun run t-shirt - a spot of misdirection about her usual activity levels wouldn’t go astray - pulled her socks up to her knees and took four long breaths.
The sergeant conducting the test set off another deluge of skin-tingling nerves, a gravel-voiced Scot built like a fire hydrant. He growled, “Clarke?”
When she nodded, he jabbed his clipboard at the weight bench while he wrote a note with a sneer curling the corner of his mouth.
Ignore him! Ignore him! 
With shaking hands, Amanda loaded fifty kilos onto the bars, then, to prove to herself if no-one else, added another ten, stretched on the bench and pumped out half a dozen adrenaline-fuelled lifts.
“Sixty, eh?” The Scotsman lifted his chin in grudging acknowledgment as he ticked the box. “Now the rope.”
Thickly bunched cord dangled twenty feet from the rafters. Sticky tape a metre from the hook on the roof beam marked the level she had to reach. Easy, she’d practiced at the rock climbing school.
“No shoes.”
Amanda knew that. She flipped off her trainers, reached for her right sock and froze. She’d practiced bare-legged. Would the leggings stay around her ankles as she shinned up the rope? Darn it! The socks would have to stay.
She grabbed the rope and took another calming breath.
“There aren’t grips on those socks, are there?”
The denial stuck in Amanda’s throat, but she got it out in a gulp. “No.”
“It’d be easier barefoot.”
“I do it this way,” Amanda lied.
The socks’ grip failed a metre off the floor, and she slid down with a bump.
“Everyone else does it—”
“Thank you.”
Amanda considered ditching the socks for a couple of beats, but Kurt Cobain itched on the lower half of her right leg. No! She would not let a stupid post-teenage infatuation deny her the rank she’d earned.
She lurched upwards inch by agonising inch with arms screaming for mercy. Lycra slithered higher with each desperate clench to jam rope between Kurt and the sailing ship and anchor the next lunge. She chanced a glance to see what was exposed but the pine floor swirled dangerously and the Scottish trainer’s brow furrowed with transparent concern for her safety, fuelled rising panic, so Amanda set herself for one final drive. The twisted cord gnawed at bare skin. The leggings were up to her knees.
She squeezed her eyelids to hold in tears of shame and reached again. Tape! She hit sticky tape! She’d done it!
“Good job, lass,” the trainer blurted. “I canna say I’ve seen it done that way, but—”
Amanda lost her hold in the shock, scissored her knees desperately, missed the rope and hurtled down, skinning her palms with red-hot burns as she flailed to brake her descent.
The trainer flung his clipboard aside and dived to catch Amanda, but missed by a mile and arrived just as her bum cheeks slammed into the sprung-pine floorboards.
“Aargh!” 
It stung like hell, but nothing was broken, and the embarrassment hurt more.
“Are you okay?” He touched her shoulder, but his gaze tracked unerringly to the blurred visage of the King of Grunge Metal between her crumpled sock and the bunched leggings.
“I’m fine,” she sniffed.
“Umm. Err.” His hand jerked away. “That wouldn’t be tattoos visible when limbs exposed contrary to regulation 325C, paragraph four of the Universal Code of Behaviour, would it?”
The tears came in sobbing floods.
Amanda had failed without even making it to the run. Doomed to suffer as a constable for the rest of her career. If she bothered to stay. Might as well resign now. What a stupid fool she’d been! He might be the greatest frontman in rock and roll history, but what possessed her to have a rock tribute inked on her calf?
“Okay. Dinna fret, Constable Clarke.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “We oppressed minorities must stick together.” 
Amanda wasn’t sure what that meant. She’d never been bullied over tattoos. Had the grumpy Scot suffered for his ginger hair? As a migrant? Everyone in Australia was descended from migrants, even the indigenous folk who trekked to Gondwanaland from Asia. Amanda had been born at King Edward Hospital in Subiaco, herself. 
Her confusion must have shown.
The sergeant nodded to her body art. “I’ll not fail a fellow Darryl Braithwaite fan. ‘Horses’ is an all-time classic.” He retrieved his tally sheet and added a flamboyant tick. “You’d have aced it barefoot.”
Not Braithwaite the soppy Sherbet singer, Kurt Cobain! Amanda opened her mouth to correct him but turned it into a laugh. She could deny Nirvana’s iconic deity. Three times before the cock crowed, if she had to. Politics was her job now she was about to be promoted to sergeant.

Image by Kati from Pixabay